Fable 4 is crucial to Xbox’s future, but it could be a Monkey’s Paw moment for fans

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Although gaming is a creative industry where, perhaps more than any other, it’s disingenuous to pin the success of any one product on a single individual, it’s extraordinarily hard to uncouple Peter Molyneux from the Fable series.

Before his frankly unsustainably tainted reputation necessitated his departure from Lionhead Studios, in order to go off and mess around with cubes or NFTs or whatever he’s peddling now, Molyneux was a games exec with considerable power. Absolute power over his own major studio, to the point where entire game features would manifest from him inventing them in the middle of press interviews in order to “stop the journalist from going to sleep”. And, organisational power within the multi-studio hierarchy of Microsoft, which some believe was key to preserving Lionhead’s independence. Following his departure, the studio would slowly but surely break down, becoming mired in a Microsoft-mandated live service Fable game that never saw the light of day.

It’s a tragic end to one of Britain’s best, and best loved, game studios, as wonderfully reported by Wes over on Eurogamer back in 2019. And, I would argue just as tragically, it would be the end of Molyneux as a major player. Though he fell from grace from peddling one too many wheelbarrows of nonsense, culminating in some frankly shoddy treatment of an unsuspecting competition winner, part of me wishes he was still a big shot: making his deranged RPGs, doing his absurd interviews. The industry felt so much more exciting back then.

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